Agreements

The DOBES Programme agreed on a number of topics, particularly the following conclusions, which were reached after intensive discussions between all partners during the first year of the project. These have been extended upon over the following years.

1. Ethical and Legal Aspects

The partners agreed on a number of documents that have developed over time. For more details look at Ethical and Legal Aspects.

2. Technical Agreements

In the area of archiving, digitization and input to the archive, the partners agreed on a number of points:

the documentation teams should ensure they capture the highest achievable quality, and where possible not use compressed formats;

the archive should store resources in open, well-documented and widely used formats such as

UNICODE for character encoding

XML for the structural representation of texts

audio recordings should be included as 16 bit linear PCM files with 44.1 or 48 kHz sample frequency (it is strongly recommended not make recordings in MiniDisk or MP3 format)

video recordings should be stored as MPEG2 or MPEG4/H.264 files (either High Definition or Standard Definition)

photographs should be stored preferably as uncompressed TIFF files, however, JPEG and PNG are also accepted

for unstructured texts also HTML and Plain ASCII are possible

with respect to input formats it was agreed that at least the Toolbox/Shoebox and CHAT formats are supported for textual data; EAF is preferred for time-aligned annotations. Other formats such as WORD, EXCEL, Transcriber, etc. can be deposited, but no commitments can be given whether the data can be converted into accepted archival formats.

presentation formats for audio and video are generated for web and other purposes (MPEG1, MPEG4)